Marriage Counseling2.0
With technology development becoming cheap, it seems everyone is churning out a new web application (or app for the cooler amongst you). And to be honest, most of them are cr^p. Beyond the web app, it is now requisite soon thereafter to develop a Facebook and iPhone app as well. The underlying premise behind this is I presume is that if you make a cr^ppy application ubiquitous, people will somehow like it. This is from the same school of thought as a startup I once worked for called Kozmo.com which lost money on every order but figured they’d make it up in volume. The logic is warped but who needs logic? I certainly didn’t when I was at Kozmo.
So what’s wrong with this?
In some instances, nothing is wrong with the lack of logic. When it’s a couple of guys in their dorm room or garage who are putting things together, this is fine because the opportunity cost to them of spending time on this is probably a few less games on their X-box. These guys are tinkerers, and this is actually a great thing which should be encouraged. My money is on the fact that they’ll learn some stuff and keep rolling it into bigger and better ideas down the road.
The problem is with those ideas that raise some money or that a founder or two go “all in” on which have no business model and/or where they are addressing a problem that is just way too small, e.g., the market opportunity is not that big or already way too crowded. Any number of social networks, iPhone or Facebook apps or software as a service/cloud computing, etc upstarts today fall into one or multiple of these traps.
And then sometimes, you come across an idea that is exceedingly simple but which captures your attention and might even have an outside chance of becoming something of some scale (even though the business model may be a bit uncertain today). In this camp is a new company called Sidetaker.
- A husband or wife (or boyfriend/girlfriend) posts a complaint they have with their significant other
- An email goes to the significant other for them to respond
- After they have responded, the public weighs in with advice, commentary, etc.
So for example, wife puts up a post about how husband fails to put down the toilet seat. Husband responds and then the public weighs in with advice or commentary. It can range from ideas that have worked for others in similar situations to making fun of the neanderthal husband.
At this point, the site is focused on getting people to put up their sides, but they do offer some digital ebooks on marrying millionaires, relationships, etc which those coming to the site might enjoy and which might make some money for the Sidetaker team. It seems they’ve thought of some ideas to monetize (remember that word) the traffic they’re getting but of course, the first goal will be to generate a community of SideTakers.
This taps into a need people have that will never end and which uses technology intelligently and elegantly to solve.
- People have problem in their relationships
- Others love to give advice
- Being a voyeur into someone else’s life is very popular (especially on the web)
The one deficiency is that this concept is not too hard to replicate, but people said the same for Craig’s List and they’ve doing well despite efforts by eBay, Google, Yahoo, etc to unseat them.
At some point, Sidetaker can take all their user-generated advice and become the WebMD of relationships or the goto place for online marriage counseling (a multi-billion industry based on the # of relationship self-help books and marriage counseling providers out there). Of course, the site might just be a fun diversion for its founders, but here is one web app that I think could go somewhere with the right focus. Time will tell.
Tags: craig's list, Sidetaker, webmd
